Asia and Pacific: COMPUTEX: Taiwan manufacturers gear up for dual-layer DVD
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service (Tokyo Bureau)
The trickle of drives and media supporting new dual-layer DVD formats looks set to turn into a flood in the coming months as Taiwan's major drive and disc manufacturers prepare to start mass production.
Dual-layer discs feature a second recording layer inside the disc and increase storage capacity to 8.5 Gbytes from the 4.7 Gbyte storage capacity of a single-layer disc. They are different from double-sided discs because both recording layers can be accessed from one side of the disc and so users don't have to take out the disc and flip it over to get access to the extra capacity.
Drives and discs supporting dual-layer versions of both the DVD-R and DVD+R formats were on show by many major vendors at the Computex trade show here this week with product plans for the latter of the two formats clearly more advanced.
DVD+R DL (dual layer) discs were on display by a number of companies including Ritek Corp., Prodisc Technology Inc., CMC Magnetics Corp. and BenQ Corp. and the companies were all saying they will start mass production during the third quarter.
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Drives supporting the DVD+R DL format were also on display by many companies. The majority support writing at 2.4 times standard speed (2.4X writing) for dual layer discs although second-generation drives supporting faster 4X writing to dual layer were also being shown.
BenQ had both types of drive on its booth and Product Manager Jo Chang [cq] said its 2.4X drives will be available from July with 4X drives following sometime during the fourth quarter. Among the planned drives is the DW1650 which will have a serial ATA interface, she said.
The BenQ DVD+R DL drives and those on show from other vendors such as Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. and Micro-Star International Co. Ltd. (MSI) also support faster 16X DVD+R writing.
Ritek's Lee said the company is expecting to sell its first discs for a premium of around 75 percent over single-sided discs and thinks that will fall over time to a premium of around 50 percent.
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Asia and Pacific: Motorola-brand LCD and PDP TVs set for launch
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service (Tokyo Bureau)
The first flat-panel televisions to bear the Motorola brand name should be available in the U.S. and Asian markets within the next few months, the Taiwanese company making the products said Tuesday at the Computex trade show in Taipei.
Moxell Technology Inc. plans to begin selling PDP (plasma display panel) televisions under the Motorola brand in China from this month and a range of LCD (liquid crystal display) televisions bearing the name in the U.S. market from August. (...)
Motorola-brand monitors are already on sale in China, with PDP televisions next on the schedule. LCD TVs will follow in July and digital CRT (cathode ray tube) televisions in August or September. LCD TVs will go on sale in the U.S. in August, followed by PDP TVs and rear-projection TVs based on Texas Instruments Inc.'s DLP (digital light processing) technology. (...)
Asia and Pacific: Via's Chen maps PC industry changes
By Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service (Taipei Bureau)
The blurring lines between consumer electronics and computing is changing the way that the PC industry works, according to Wenchi Chen, the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Via Technologies Inc.
"What we are doing is not just technology anymore. What we are doing is more fun," Chen said in a keynote speech Thursday on the sidelines of the Computex 2004 exhibition here in Taipei. "The pro-ducts we are doing will be applications-based rather than in the past, where what we were doing was more computation-based."
As the distinction between consumer electronics and computing devices shrinks, the x86 processor architecture used in most personal computers will be more important than ever before, Chen said, noting that the venerable processor architecture supports all of the existing digital media formats and provides a platform for the development of future formats.
But while the hardware industry can continue to rely upon the existing processor architecture, it must become less rigid, with more room for creativity and for companies to experiment with new types of devices developed for specialized applications built around digital media, he said.
"If the innovation is centralized, it's controlled. We don't think that will have a long life. That's more like a master-slave mode, this is a kind of liberation," Chen said.
"We believe content will play a bigger and bigger role," Chen said, noting that there are growing opportunities for devices able to access on-demand services for communication, entertainment and education. There will also be an increased need for servers for both storage and computational applications, the Via CEO said.
"The key industry challenge for all of us is that we are moving from commoditization to customization," Chen said.
Responding well to these opportunities will not be easy for the hardware industry, Chen said. Vendors must respond to demand for digital consumer electronics pro-ducts by working together more closely and producing products that users will enjoy using, he said
"A big challenge for all of us is shorter product development cycles," Chen said. "It's our job to bring a faster and shorter product development cycle to the general market."
"Closer cooperation between all of us is required to make this happen," the CEO said.
One product that has been slow to reach end users because of lengthy product development cycles is Via's own line of Nano-ITX (12 centimeters by 12 centimeters) motherboard, the EPIA-N. The Nano-ITX motherboards were announced by Chen at the Computex exhibition here in September 2003, but systems based on the motherboards have yet to reach the market nine months later.
"We need a faster product development cycle," Chen said, speaking with IDG News Service after his keynote speech. "The adoption (of new products like the Nano-ITX) today still takes very long,"
"We have a lot of customers (who) like the Nano-ITX and they're working on it ... but it takes a long time for them to start shipping a product and bring it to market," Chen said.
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Asia and Pacific: Acer dresses up new notebooks
By Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service (Taipei Bureau)
In an announcement on Monday that was heavy on style but light on technical details, Taiwan's Acer Inc. introduced the latest additions to its notebook computer lines, the Aspire 1800 and TravelMate 3200.
Acer's latest notebooks are dressed in more stylish cases than the company's existing notebook models. The Aspire 1800 and TravelMate 3200 offer rounded outside edges and a sleek metallic-looking exterior. The design could find its way into future notebooks from the company if users respond well, said Campbell Kan, chief officer of Acer's notebook product line.
"We're looking for feedback from users," Kan said.
The Aspire 1800, which is aimed at home users, offers a 17-inch TFT-LCD (thin film transistor liquid crystal display) screen and includes a remote control that fits into the notebook's PCMCIA card slot when not in use. The smaller TravelMate 3200 is designed for home office and business users; its thin and light design is intended to be easily portable. On the inside, both notebooks have a shortcut key that is used to launch Acer's system software utility, including power management functions, display settings, security and boot options.
The Aspire 1800 and TravelMate 3200 are expected to be available worldwide during the third quarter. Acer did not provide pricing or further details on the hardware configurations or specifications for the two notebooks, saying detailed specifications would be made available at the Computex 2004 exhibition, which begins tomorrow in Taipei.
Asia and Pacific: Transmeta shows 1.6 GHz Efficeon processor
By Martyn Williams, IDG News Service (Tokyo Bureau)
Transmeta Corp. is showing working samples of the latest version of its Efficeon processor at the Computex trade show in Taipei this week.
The 1.6GHz version of the processor is scheduled to ship this July or August and will be followed with the release of at least one faster version of the chip before the end of the year, said Walter Sun, product marketing manager for Transmeta. The company's current fastest Efficeon processor runs at 1.2GHz.
In addition to operating at a higher clock speed, the new chip is also the first manufactured for the company by Fujitsu Ltd. and using a 90 nanometer production pro-cess. The company's current chips are manufactured on a 130 nanometer process by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp.
In making the switch to a 90 nanometer process, Transmeta is following other processor makers including Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which have also begun offering chips built using similar technology. Each step to a more advanced production process provides engineers a chance to reduce the physical size of the chip or cram more components onto a chip of the same size. It can also help lower power consumption.
A system based on a prototype Efficeon was running at Computex and Transmeta demonstrated the chip's support for Microsoft Corp.'s NX (No Execute) feature. NX is a security feature that blocks attempts to cause buffer overruns, which are a common way for a virus or worm to infiltrate a computer or cause it to crash.
The company also used the show to demonstrate its LongRun 2 technology, which will be avail-able in 90 nanometer chips later this year. The system is being codeveloped by Transmeta and Japan's NEC Electronics Corp. and manages transistor leakage to help re-duce power consumption.
America: Open source IP telephony in prime time? No
By Zeus Kerravala, Network World (US)
In theory, an open source IP telephony system will increase the demand for IP telephony, create better interoperability between IP phone systems and drive down the cost of IP telephony by putting price pressure on the traditional phone system vendors. An open source model for IP telephony might yield these results at some time in the distant future, but it will have no such effect in the short term, for a number of reasons.
The major reason is that, for most companies, the phone system is the most important communication tool the organization has. Some software developers or network managers might tinker with open source software, but no CIO will rest the fate of the company's most important customer-facing tool on an unproven technology. Open source IP telephony systems lack the necessary features and management tools to make the technology a viable alternative to current phone systems.
Additionally, today's phone sys-tem buyers are primarily traditional voice managers or data networking managers, not application developers. Voice and data managers want an IP telephony system that can re-place their TDM systems, not IP telephony software that can be deployed, modified and tweaked. This is one reason the dominant voice and data vendors such as Avaya Inc., Nortel Networks Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. carry the lion's share of the IP telephony market. Any open source solution will not easily integrate into a traditional vendor environment, adding to the difficulty of engineering a quality IP telephony system.
Supporters of open source IP telephony also say the technology will generate more interest in IP telephony. This is more myth than reality. There is already a tremendous amount of interest in IP telephony technology. A recent Yankee Group survey indicates that 78 percent of all U.S.-based companies have an interest in IP telephony.
The main deterrent to deploying IP telephony across the company today is quality of service and manageability issues, not infrastructure costs. The Yankee Group research shows that software and hardware costs total less than 20 percent of the cost of running a network. Better tools to manage the IP telephony ecosystem will drive down costs and drive up adoption faster than a new model for pricing the IP PBX platform. There are many third-party companies focused on providing management tools, which currently are being developed for the traditional vendors - meaning that an IP telephony system from Cisco, Nortel or Avaya will be more manageable than one from an open source vendor.
Deploying an IP telephony sys-tem is a question of value, not cost. So even though an open source model might appear to be a nice, idealistic view of where the market could go, it doesn't address the current barriers to adoption: quality and manageability. While open source might prove to be a serious threat in the distant future - say, 10 years from now - it's currently not ready for prime time.
Kerravala is vice president of enterprise infrastructure research and consulting at The Yankee Group.